“Let me guess,” Eliza says. “You think it could be that Stone?”
“There’s one way to find out,” I say. “That’s why I need your help.” I display every volume of Shakespeare the Clifftons have and three different Shakespeare biographies, including the new one I ordered from Mr. Fitzpatrick. “Let’s see if there’s anything in here called the Helena Stone.”
I hand A Midsummer Night’s Dream to George and All’s Well That Ends Well to Will. “These both have Helenas in them,” I say, “so let’s start there. Eliza, Beas, and I will take the remaining biographies.”
We each crack open our books and dig in.
The room settles into silent concentration, rustled only by the quick flipping of pages, the pouring of more coffee, until George closes his copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t see anything,” he admits. “You guys have something?”
“I think I do,” Will says, jabbing his book. “Here. This one has a Helena and a plot about a ring. Listen to this. Helena is described as some sort of healer.”
I read the words over his shoulder:
“I have seen a medicine
That’s able to breathe life into a stone.
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary,
With spritely fire and motion,
Whose simple touch is powerful to araise King Pippen.”
“Yes!” I say. “And look at this.” I bring out a pen to wrap a dark circle around another passage:
“Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,
Hath not in nature’s mystery more science
Than I have in this ring.”
Will hesitates and then leans forward to pick up the Stone from around my neck, my skin heating at the brush of his fingers. I watch his lips carefully as he speaks.
“If this Stone has the power to make someone better by its touch,” he says, “to heal like ‘multiplying medicine,’ then no wonder Stefen wanted it.”
He holds it to the light, shining through clear and sharp to illuminate the teardrop suspended inside, and I remember, suddenly, how off I’d felt at first when Miles had taken it. The persistent, pounding headache. And that was only after wearing it for a month.
“That could maybe explain why the Hypnosis Variants didn’t work on you,” George says.
“Why my mother was never sick growing up,” I add softly. I take the Stone back from Will with fingers that betray the slightest shake.
“And,” Will says, “maybe that’s why she could leave, even though she was from here.” He gestures to demonstrate his point and make sure I grasp it. “Because she was wearing that Stone.”
It protected her, I think. Until the day she must have taken it off to send it to Stefen. I close my eyes. It lines up with when she’d become ill. And why the Disappearances finally caught up to her.
“So maybe someone stole that Stone from Shakespeare,” Beas muses. “And it released some sort of Curse from his very own pages.”
“But—?wait,” Eliza says. “This still doesn’t make sense. The Helena Stone might have been what helped Juliet leave. But that doesn’t explain why we’re still cursed.”
“Right. Why wouldn’t the Curse have just followed your mother?” George asks. “And why would it affect so many different towns? If the Curse is on the Stone, then the Disappearances should have ended here and started up in Gardner.”
I sigh. Every time I think we’ve glimpsed the end of the maze, we run straight into another wall.
Think.
“Let’s take a break,” I say. Will leads us to the kitchen, where we ring around the wooden table, making sandwiches on crusted bread and eating Mrs. Mackelroy’s casseroles. I can’t help but notice that Will barely touches his, and suddenly I’m no longer hungry, either.
I take a plate to Miles in his room. He tries to hide what he’s working on, but I see it anyway. He’s crushing seed packets of lilies of the valley, mint tea bags, fir needles. All of Mrs. Cliffton’s favorite things. He sees me looking at his piles, his attempts at little makeshift Variants. “I’m going to find a way to bring her back,” he says fiercely. I can tell he’s been crying.
I hesitate. Set the plate down on the desk. Touch his arm gently before I leave. “Me, too.”
When I return downstairs, the rest of them have finished lunch and traipsed back to the library. I sink down into my seat with newly blazing resolve, and George hands me a plate of cookies.
“Where did we leave off?” Eliza asks.
“We think the Helena Stone is somehow related to the Curse, but it’s not the whole thing. There’s still something particular about the Sisters,” George says.
I tick off my fingers: “Something is still here, something that’s related to Shakespeare, something that has even more importance than this Stone.”
George’s brow knits. “After all, even the ring doesn’t protect you from the Disappearances when you’re inside the borders,” he says to me. “It’s as though it gets overpowered when you’re close enough to the Curse’s source.”
“So that’s what the maps are going to lead us to, right?” Eliza ventures. “Something still here, that Shakespeare would have cared enough about to put this horrid Curse on us all.”
“And we’re just going to jaunt out and dig this cursed thing up, huh?” George says. “Hmm. Sounds reasonable.”
“Maybe it’s buried treasure?” Eliza suggests, her eyebrow cocking with irony. “Heirlooms from a royal family?”
“Or maybe the addresses of a family line descended from a lover who scorned him?” George adds.
Beas is studying something in the biography I gave her, and she suddenly makes a noise in her throat.
“This biography says that Shakespeare always feared that someone would dig up his grave and disturb his bones. Enough that he had this sign engraved near his tombstone.”
GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE.
BLESE BE YE MAN Y SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE Y MOVES MY BONES.
She flips the page toward us.
“I think I know what we’re going to find at the end of those maps,” Beas says.
I whisper, “We’re going to find his bones.”
George says, “He put a curse on his own grave?”
“With words taken from his own pages,” Will says.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Though neither of us speaks of it, the tension between Will and me mounts as the clock creeps closer to midnight. Every nerve inside me tingles. So many things depend on whether we’re right tonight. My mother’s past. His mother’s future.